A FIERCE WIND

            A fierce wind is blowing overhead; sounds like waves crashing on a rocky shore, not usual at all. Usual is still and quiet, not noisy from the wind.  But I’m protected, sheltered by the tall trees and the house, in my little gully.

            The night sky is black and twinkly and a little fuzzy.  I close my eyes, breath in the night and sit with the stillness within.  I open my eyes and the sky is no longer fuzzy.  It’s bright black with silver twinkles.  

            The wind feels like chaos, the sky feels like order.  Order within the chaos, chaos within the order.  Much like me lying here, looking up while my mind is running with the chaos of life.  Murder, betrayals, wars, jealousy, greed.  The human condition is a joke in a horror movie.  But the stars in the night sky are perfectly ordered unimaginably immense, and the whole thing seems to run like clockwork.  Why are we here?  What are we adding?  Are we chaos or are we order?

                        DON’T QUIET THE MIND – FAGGETABOUTIT

            “I can’t meditate”, she said to me.  “I tried, but I just can’t stop my mind.  I can’t stop thinking. I can’t meditate, so I stopped.”  

            Of course you can’t stop thinking.  That’s the whole point.  If you could, you’d be pretty distinctive.  One of a kind 

            Focus on your breathing, faggetabout your mind.  The more you try to quiet your mind, the more you’re focusing on your mind the more you’ll never quiet it.  Focus on your breathing.  Feel the sensation of the breath as you breath in and out.  Focus on the sensation.  The sensation in the body is the link between the conscious and the unconscious and is the key to unlocking the Secrets of the Universe.  Big secret.  You’re connected to everything.

            Just observe, be aware, you’ll Be Here Now and it’s good for your complexion.  Just observing the body is like getting a negative ion charge.  Like the waves of the ocean washing over your body. It’s great for your skin.

            With Skin in the Game it’s the ultimate utilitarian result.  

Poor Charlie Kirk or The American Way???

Charlie Kirk Charlie Kirk

Poor victim of the American Way

People shot every day

            School Children, Senators, Presidents, CEOs, Passers By

Executions

            Every class, every color, every sex

It’s the American Way

Supporting the NRA in the biggest way

Is Russia

            Stoking fear, stoking hatred, stoking gun sales

It’s the American Way

            More guns than people

            Semi-Automatics, pistols, shot guns, home-made printed guns

Death is our calling card

Hidden in the language of defense

War is the game

Profit is the way

Poor Charlie Kirk

Poor Senators, poor children, poor innocent bystanders

Too many names to memorialize

Except in the hearts of their spouses, parents, teachers or friends

President Kennedy shocked us all

Then Martin, then Bobby, a few more unknowns, and even a Pope

Then more guns to protect us from ourselves

More guns to protect us from ourselves

Moses said “thou shalt not kill”

Jesus “blessed the peacemakers” and “turned the other cheek”

And Buddha simply said “no killing”, period

But, a “well-regulated militia is necessary to defend”

Has somehow become an AK-47 in the hands of any

Insecure incel or mentally disturbed psycho

With enough cash to make it to a gun show

No ID, no background check, no common sense

Just cash

Like the Justice Kash, Patel.  No common sense

The president walks around with his brains hanging out

Pushing diplomats off stage, so he can stand out

Laughing at disabled folks

Encouraging his supporters

To Storm the Capital, because he didn’t get his way

At rallies, he encourages violence against his enemies

He even has an enemies list, like Nixon in the old days

The Emperors of old said to divide and conquer

The Emperor of today learned well and has no clothes

Is naked to the world with his ass sticking out

and his mouth like a blowfish

He wants to shut down comics, prosecute commentators

Who think he’s a threat

Who think he’s a fool

Who think he’s gone too far

The people sit and watch, as it’s hard to turn from a wreck

If the ratings are good and they still buy more stuff

Doesn’t matter what he says, as long as we watch

Charlie Kirk had the good sense

to appreciate his parody on South Park

His skin thick enough for a little sarcasm

He was a modern-day Bill Buckley

With an “everyman” demeanor and a talent for debate

Not a pencil wielding snarky intellectual from the upper class

A true man of the people

The debater is dead, shot in the head

With an engraved bullet, an American made bullet

Poor Charlie Kirk, the debate is done

Guns verses butter, guns won

After 911

Jesus straddled a jeep,

 wrapped in an American Flag and carried an AK-47

The new Christians

have taken Christ the Peacemaker out of Christianity

and made him into a God of War and Retribution

So much for Peacemaking and Defense

The Gods of War have renamed the Department of Defense

To the Department of War

So we’ll finish off any invasion that the Russians start

Because they do fund the NRA

And our Pedophile President want’s nothing more

Than to join the club of autocrats

Who now hold 70% of the Planet hostage

The old American Way was Corporate Capitalism

From both parties

Faggetabout Main Street Capitalism

Too democratic

Corporate Capitalism eventually leads to Fascism

Nazism is National Socialism

The billionaires are eating up the millionaires

Poor Charlie Kirk

He’s gone

But his family lives on

No father, no husband, no dad any more

Just a memory to be memorialized

Not sanctified

With more guns, more guns, more guns

It’s the New American Way

Supported by Putin and the NRA

It’s ever more profits

It’s chaos and fear

The billionaires like to see the workers fearful and afraid

So they’ll show up every day and keep the smooth machine running

Profits for them and crumbs for those others

The new and improved American Way.

The Myth of Democratic Capitalism

We live in a society that we like to refer to as Democratic, and with the advent of Trump’s attack on every norm and institution, we see an immediate threat to our Democratic form of government. We “coastal elites” criticize some institutions and disagree with some policies, but the “fly-over” states have been screwed royally by those same institutions and policies since the 1980’s, with attacks on unionization and the opening of globalization. Somehow, the “anti-elites” want to blame everything on somebody or something, so Trump, in his infinite wisdom and perpetual cheapness, hired half a dozen folks somewhere in the Southeast; to sit in a room and listen to right wing talk radio all day and write down what was being called in by listeners. That’s how he came up with his platform, for a penny on a dime. He took their grievances to heart and became their champion, attacking anything and everything in their way.
The problem is that the Democratic system that we so proudly embrace has been subsumed by the Capitalist system. We don’t live under Democratic Capitalism; we live in a Capitalist Democracy. It started with the 14th Amendment back in the 19th Century and ended with Citizens United (talk about double speak) vs Federal Election Commission in 2010, where a corporation, an artificial entity created on paper that never dies unless dissolved, is treated like a real live living human being. How crazy is that?

When Stonewall happened that fateful night on June 27, 1969 nobody expected it.  Just a typical payoff to the cops kind of night, with a slight irregularity to it;  like the day George Floyd was killed, a typical kill a black guy kind of day with a little irregularity to it.

The killing of George Floyd was not that unusual by itself. Racist cop called in on a minor infraction treating a black suspect like he’s some kind of animal. Four Boys in Blue cuffing a black man for ”possibly” passing a counterfeit $20 in a local bodega, roughly pushing him across the street to the back side of their cruiser, then throwing him to the ground where he starts bleeding. The Alpha cop steps on his neck while the other two drop to their knees, not on the ground, no, on top of his back with legs off the ground to achieve full pressure. The “Good Cop” stands there watching with impunity while passersby pass on by and a casual young girl iPhones the “dry lynching. For over eight minutes they taunt him to get up and get in the car, while he pleads for breath, for his life, and ultimately cries out for his “Mama”. The slight irregularity is the casual young girl with the iPhone. Their impunity is so ingrained that they don’t even see that she’s filming their homicide. They don’t see it. It’s just another Kill a Black Guy kind of day. But this time the irregularity made it to the Front Page, and we had all reached the Tipping Point. Six weeks of Sheltering in Place, with an in-charge mad man attempting to not see what was right before everybody’s eyes, like the Emperor with no clothes, had us all on the edge a bit. It gave us time to see more clearly that not only was the Emperor naked, but the entire Justice System was as nakedly exposed as the Emperor.

The riot in the Stonewall bar was the result of another irregularity. A crooked cop just doing what crooked cops had been doing for the last few decades, and a black girl in the right place at the right time. Most of the gay bars in Manhattan with few exceptions were frequented by gay guys. This was one of those exceptions. Stonewall was in the West Village on Christopher Street which was strictly guys, while the rest of the West Village was mostly gals. There was a mixed crowd this particular Friday night
The correct cop procedure was to come into a gay bar for their regularly scheduled payoffs during the week when it wasn’t too crowded. That way you didn’t disturb business too much. To be clear, the cop’s payoff wasn’t supposed to interfere with the mob’s business. The monthly payoff was par for all the gay bars, as every gay bar in Manhattan payed off the cops and the mob. When my Father’s bar was a “straight” bar the payoffs were quarterly, when it became a gay bar the payoffs were monthly. The cops made their presence in the neighborhood known and were able to instill just the right amount of fear and intimidation to keep everybody on board.. Also, the cops who came into the bar, were part of a larger syndicate of cops and not necessarily connected to the same precinct that any particular bar was in.

Friday night June 27, 1969, the cops from the Greenwich Village Precinct that the Stonewall Bar was in, were “sick and tired” of the uptown cops coming into their precinct and shaking down their bars. They were going to do it themselves, and they were going to go in on a busy Friday night.
So, in come the local Boys in Blue, making their way through the partying crowd to the back room. A black bull dyke in the back room saw them coming. She saw them coming and she was up to here with it. That was it, no more of this bullshit. No more paying off the cops just so she could have a drink and hang out with her friends. She didn’t quite realize the other half of the equation; that the Mob actually owned the joint and the barkeeps were window dressing that managed the transfer of money. She jumped up and said, I’m paraphrasing, “we’re not going to take it anymore”. That started it and the whole place erupted.

The local precinct cops couldn’t get out of the bar but were able to make it to the bathroom where they barricaded themselves in, while the patrons barricaded the front windows and doors. It was a riot inside Stonewall and a riot outside on the streets. As news of the riot spread throughout Greenwich Village more and more of the mostly gay guys, came out, physically came out into the streets and surrounded the bar. By the time the paddy wagon arrived it was too late, and what should have been a local event turned into the event of the century. The paddy wagon cops dallied in their response in order to “punish” the precinct cops who were where they shouldn’t be on a night when they shouldn’t be. Talk about turf wars.

Meanwhile, a little old man with a cheap fedora who usually plays bocce at the bocce ball court in Greenwich Village is sitting somewhere in a corner of Stonewall wishing he was home. Every gay bar in Manhattan had a little old Italian man, in a cheap fedora sitting somewhere in a corner watching out for the interest of the mob; because the cops and the mob were in this together and the mob wasn’t as visible as the cops, so they needed a little back up. The mob owned the bar which paid the cops so that the cops didn’t close them down, because it was an ABC (Alcohol Beverage Control) regulation that you could close down a bar if there was a gay person in it. Didn’t matter if he was in a three-piece suit with Gucci shoes and a Dior necktie or swishy wrist and a silk scarf. Gay: close it down. So, we have the ABC, the NYPD and the Sicilian Mob, all collaborating to get a piece of the action, all at the expense of a persecuted and reviled minority. Sound familiar? By noon that very day, the NYC Homophile Youth Movement – HYMN, with the help of the Village Voice newspaper, which just happened to be at the other end of the block, published the now classic flyer, “GET THE MAFIA AND THE COPS OUT OF THE NEW YORK CITY BARS”.

Stonewall opened that very night. The clean-up fixers crew came in and rebuilt the bar, restocked with their untaxed watered-down booze and filled the cigarette machine with their untaxed cigarettes bootlegged from Virginia, which you could buy uptown once a week on 45th Street and Vanderbilt Avenue at the back of Grand Central Station. I did, every Friday. Everybody who was anybody was in on the fix and got a little piece of the action. That’s Trickle-Down Economics in the Carnegie Hall Culture of Corruption.

Well, Stonewall reopened but the anger wasn’t quelled. A conglomeration of “anti-Vietnam War, pro-Black, pro-Women, pro-Hippy, anti-Capitalist left-wing politics,” or the entire counter-culture of the late 1960’s, met one month later on July 24th and formed the Gay Liberation Front. They started meeting and talking and organizing and by the end of the year the little known homophile movement turned into the first Gay Liberation Day Parade on the streets of Greenwich Village. We now have GAY PRIDE day every year on the whole planet.

Black Lives Matter has been around since 2013, has an organization in place and is not going to stop until real reform happens. The roots of Democratic Capitalism are based on the commodification of all people, with white people in charge and black people at their beck and call. The economic success of Capitalism is based on the enslavement of an entire race, and the roots of Democracy ensured the dehumanization of that race, which elevated the enforcers to a position of superiority. That superiority has traveled through the centuries to where we are today. Racial injustice is built into the system. It’s “systematic” and requires systematic change.
It started for me in my father’s bar, which led me to understand what happened at the Stonewall bar, and to see clearly today why the death of George Floyd is leading Black Lives Matter to take on the issues that the whole system of Democratic Capitalism is based on. Slavery, greed, corruption and immunity for those enforcing this rule of disorder. The entire system is built on a base of sand that’s collapsing right before our very eyes. Climate change, Covid-19, swine flu on it’s way, apocalyptic events becoming a daily occurrence, global right wing fascism, state surveillance, are all a wake-up calls from the living breathing earth that we all live on. If we don’t fix it, it will fix us. Evolve or die.